Advertisements may provide useful information to a user of an online service. For example, in the healthcare context, advertisements may be generated along with search results by a search engine of a health-related online service in response to a health related search query. Such advertisements may include links to target information on health related goods and services such as books, medical devices, pharmaceuticals, medical services which are related to the health related search query. These advertisements and their linked target information may complement unsponsored search results, by providing important information on commercially available goods and services.
One drawback with online advertising, however, is that it is fleeting, disappearing when the user browses to a different website. Thus, advertisement information may be lost unless the user selects the advertisement during the search session, by clicking an embedded hyperlink in the advertisement. Alternatively, a user may print out the advertisement, write the name of the goods or services down, or otherwise attempt to manually record information about the advertisement, but such manual methods suffer from the drawback that they are time intensive and do not retain a record of any content that is linked by hyperlink to the advertisement. The fleeting nature of online advertising is a barrier to its potential effectiveness as an information source for users, and as a revenue generation tool for advertisers.